Diary chronicles friendship, death in New Mexico

CARLSBAD, N.M. -- Raffi Kodikian, who faces a murder trial in this little desert town, was a poetic wanderer at heart, a freer spirit than the man he killed, his buddy David Coughlin.

Done with college, bored by his office job in Boston, Kodikian, an aspiring journalist, yearned to travel, to write about the romance of the road. Coughlin was his alter ego, a systems man, a traffic policy analyst in a Boston suburb. When the two best friends set out last July to cross America in a '94 Mazda, Coughlin, 26, was bound for graduate school in California. Kodikian, 25, was along for the adventure, chasing the sunset like his favorite novelist, Jack Kerouac.

Their trip -- and Coughlin's life -- ended here in the oven heat of the Chihuahuan Desert, amid the thorny brush and sun-blasted limestone of a gorge called Rattlesnake Canyon. Stopping to camp in a national park, they left Coughlin's Mazda beside a gravel road and hiked into the back country -- and "got turned around," as the locals say, meaning lost. Though they were never far from the car, they stumbled along the canyon's narrow, rock-strewn arroyos for three days, out of water, a pair of East Coast yuppies squinting up at craggy hillsides that all looked the same, parched and treeless.

On Aug. 8 -- nine days after they had left Boston -- it was Kodikian, the storyteller, who authored the journey's final chapter. Weary and dehydrated in the arid, 100-plus-degree heat, he sat in the silence of the desert, scribbling in his and Coughlin's journal.

"Sunday," he wrote atop the page.

"I killed & burried (sic) my best friend today. Dave had been in pain all night. At around 5 or 6, he turned to me & begged that I put my knife through his chest. I did, & a second time when he wouldn't die. He still breathed and spoke, so I told him I was going to cover his face. He said OK. He struggled but died. I burried (sic) him w/ love. God & his family & mine, please forgive me."

It is an extraordinary document, the 16 diary entries from the desert, a chronicle of desperation and despair in which both men wrote of their flagging stamina and bade farewell to loved ones. Authorities seized the journal later that Sunday, after Kodikian was found in the canyon and airlifted to a hospital. And when he faces a jury here next month in a case raising questions about the nature of mercy and murder, the 5-by-7-inch Cambridge spiral notebook will be the center of attention.

Kodikian's attorney, Gary Mitchell, who didn't respond to repeated interview requests, has described the stabbing as a fatal act of kindness, part of a death pact between the friends. He has said Kodikian intended to kill himself after ending Coughlin's suffering, but was too weak to do so.

"Keep in mind that they were close friends," Mitchell told the Boston Herald after Kodikian's arrest. "My client feels horrible. They both thought they were going to die and both were extremely ill."

Kodikian wrote on the eve of the killing, dashing the words at an angle across the page: "We will not let the buzzards get us alive. God forgive us."

Then: "Dave has asked that his remains be creamated (sic) & thrown over the edge of the grand canyon. I leave the handling of my remains to my family."

And this, from Coughlin to his girlfriend: "I am in utter agony and I know you would understand. I LOVE YOU SO MUCH!!! I have barely eaten & drank since Wed. evening. Nobody is coming to help. You will always be in my heart and you will now always have an angel standing by."

New Mexico law doesn't allow mercy killings or assisted suicides. In court papers, Mitchell has indicated he will pursue an insanity defense, arguing that Kodikian was mentally disoriented from extreme heat and thirst when he plunged his 4-inch folding blade into Coughlin's chest.

But the Eddy County sheriff, Mark A. "Chunky" Click, and the prosecutor, Les Williams, have a different view. They said the tragic adventure tale of death and survival -- most of it penned by Kodikian -- is full of holes.

Although Kodikian was "moderately to severely dehydrated," the sheriff said, he wasn't close to dying when park ranger Lance Mattson found him. He was fully coherent and able to walk, his pulse was only slightly fast, and his blood pressure was normal, Mattson said. Click said Kodikian was treated at the hospital for about an hour before he was healthy enough to be jailed.

Coughlin's dehydration also was well short of critical, an autopsy showed. He would have survived like his friend had he not been stabbed twice in the heart. In a scene from the Old West, Kodikian laid out his buddy's corpse and covered it with boulders.

"It's not logical," Click said. "They're doomed! No water! They're weak! They're going to die! Yet here he has the strength to go around picking up 60- and 70- and 80-pound rocks."

Click sent one of his senior deputies, Capt. Eddie Carrasco, to the Boston area to search for a hidden motive behind the killing, but Carrasco came up empty. "No one I talked with ever heard a cross word between them," the captain said. "They were the best of friends."

So there will be no surprises from the prosecution. "My case is a philosophical one," Williams said. "Where there's life, there's hope. Do we want to live in a society where people can kill other people just because they imagine they're in a desperate situation? I think the answer is obviously no."

He said he will seek a first-degree murder conviction, which would mean a mandatory life sentence for Kodikian, who is free on $50,000 bail. Depending on what a jury decides about his mental state, he could be acquitted. Or he could be found guilty of second-degree murder, punishable by up to 15 years, or manslaughter, punishable by up to six. With an empathetic judge, a verdict of second-degree murder or manslaughter could mean probation.

Only one man knows how desperate they were. "God has made my life decision for me, no more worries," Kodikian wrote.

They were raised in comfortable homes in leafy towns -- Coughlin in Wellesley, a Boston suburb, Kodikian in Buckingham Township near Philadelphia. By all accounts they grew up to be fine young men. When they met in 1994, they were students, Coughlin at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, studying resource economics, Kodikian in Boston, a journalism major at Northeastern University.

With his diploma, Coughlin settled into a job at Wellesley's town hall, dealing with traffic issues. But his best friend wasn't nearly so grounded. After graduating with honors in June 1997, Kodikian gassed up his Jeep and drove off to look for America. "My fear was this: that the road wouldn't be everything Jack Kerouac had promised it would be," he wrote after his 10-week journey to California and back.

He sold that travelogue to the Boston Globe, where he had worked as an editorial assistant in his college years. "My trip has been caked on my tires, dripped on my boots, and seared into my memory as one of the greatest experiences I could have imagined," he wrote. "And God willing, I'll get the chance to do it again."

Last spring, seeking career advice, Kodikian had coffee with Jerry Morris, the Globe's travel editor, who warned him that free-lance travel writing didn't pay well. But Kodikian was stuck in an entry-level job at a Boston mutual funds company, wasting his writing skills banging out customer-care letters. So he quit when the chance came to roll west again -- this time with his best pal, who was headed to the University of California at Santa Barbara to study environmental sciences. They set out on Friday, July 30.

The following Wednesday, just after 3 p.m., they pulled into Carlsbad Caverns National Park, 33,000 acres of hilly, barren wilderness in the high desert of southern New Mexico. When they asked where they could camp for the night, a ranger told them Rattlesnake Canyon, and pointed to a gravel road winding into the back country. They drove in the hot dust until they reached an overlook, then hiked down 700 feet to the canyon trails, carrying backpacks and a few quarts of water. All around them, rising at steep but walkable angles, were rocky hillsides, bleached and lifeless. They hiked along a dry wash for a mile and a half and set up camp, gathering brush for a fire as darkness began to fall.

When the sun came up, they were turned around. "HELP. HELP," Kodikian wrote that Thursday. "Camped Wed, started back Thursday morning, but couldn't find the entrance to the trail leading to the car. We've got minimal water & have been eating cactus fruit. We need help."

As they wandered Friday and Saturday -- never more than a few miles from the trail they were seeking -- the diary entries grew increasingly panicked, then forlorn. Had they hiked up one of the hills, they might have seen the gravel road in the distance, and it remains a mystery why they didn't try. Although Kodikian gave a brief account of his ordeal to his rescuers, he stopped talking when the handcuffs went on.

The two friends had a camping permit, so rangers knew they were in the park. Sunday afternoon, ranger Mattson, high on a plateau, spotted their tattered tent on the distant canyon floor. He hiked down, wondering if they were all right.

"Please tell me you have water," were the first words Kodikian spoke, according to Mattson's report. The ranger handed him a canteen.